integers and floating points

[Alaric Williams]

On 27 Oct 1999, Laurent Martelli wrote:

> Yes, but the set of integers is a subset of the reals, so they are not
> so different. That's why we exepect to be able to add an integer and a
> real. 

"real" and "floating point" are different things... we CAN do exact
arithmetic with reals; consider that any real number must be the result of
an expression, such as "root 2" or "pi", so you can just store it as the
expression and do everything with symbolic manipulations!

"real" is something in the mathematical domain, "floating point" is one
(approximate) implementation of "real", and a poor one at that!

ABW

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